On Wed, Jan 08, 2025 at 05:42:53PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > I was unable to build from Texinfo git master. There is an error about > missing -lperl:
This is linked with the embedding of a Perl interpreter. Indeed, the ctexi2any main program requires embedding a Perl interpreter, the corresponding code being actually in the new libtexinfo-main library. The missing libperl should be detected in configure.ac: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git/commit/?id=694afd4dd7b60bd02beab8501d80a64b55259234 But the mistake I did is that only the main program build is skipped if ! PERL_EMBEDDED, while the libperlembed_libtexinfo_main.la build should be skipped too, and so should libtexinfo-main.la unless it is possible to have libtexinfo-main.la without libperlembed_libtexinfo_main.la, I'll see what I can do. > I wondered if it was something to do with my Perl installation. Indeed: > > $ perl -V | grep embed > DEBPKG:debian/libperl_embed_doc - https://bugs.debian.org/186778 Note > that libperl-dev package is required for embedded linking > > (That referenced Debian bug dates to 2003, although it is marked as closed.) Looks like it is still not considered a bug to have ExtUtils::Embed installed and not libperl. I think that we should make sure that it is possible to have everything installed but libperl.so. > I did not have the "libperl-dev" package installed. Installing this > (about 10 MB of extra disk space), and trying again, it compiled. > > Before I worked this out, I found that I could not link to the libperl.so > file even when I gave the -L path explicitly. Which is expected. The bug is that the build should not be attempted in that case. -- Pat
